• 8oz thin spaghetti noodles
• 3 tbsp peanut oil
• 1/4 cup soy sauce
• 1/4 cup red wine vinegar
• 2 1/2 tbsp peanut butter
• 1 tsp sesame oil
• 1 tsp. sugar
• 1/2 tsp ground ginger
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 3 tbsp sesame seeds
• 2-3 fresh cloves garlic, chopped
• red cayenne pepper
• 2-3 scallions, chopped (optional)

I’m not a big scallion fan, so I left those out.

1. Cook noodles and toss with 1 tbsp peanut oil.
2. In a bowl with high sides, mix together the soy sauce, red wine vinegar, peanut butter, sesame oil, sugar, ground ginger, and salt. Beat with a fork or whisk until creamy.
3. In a large skillet, roast the sesame seeds (dry) until they are golden brown and fragrant. Let them cool on a small plate. Then use the same skillet to roast the chopped garlic in the 2 tbsp peanut oil, along with red cayenne pepper to taste.
4. When the garlic is roasted, add the noodles and sauce to the skillet. Mix and cook over low heat for 2 minutes or until sauce has started to thicken around noodles. Remove from heat and mix in sesame seeds and scallions.

This is probably obvious to anyone but me, but after you cook the sesame seeds they are hot. I tried to spread them around on the plate and burned my fingers. Whoops.

It’s good warm or cold, so make lots and have leftovers. (The pictures are actually of a double recipe, because a package of spaghetti is usually 16 oz., not 8 oz., and it seemed silly to only cook half of it.)

Ingredients:

• 4 boneless chicken breasts,* cut into bite sized pieces (1 ½ – 1 ¾ lbs.)
• 6 slices swiss cheese
• ½ cup white wine
• salt, pepper, tarragon to taste
• ¼ cup melted butter
• 1 can cream of chicken soup
• 2 cups Pepperidge Farm stuffing

* Or thighs. I’m sure everyone knows the deal on chicken breasts vs. thighs: the thighs are cheaper but fattier.

Directions:

1. Put chicken pieces in greased 9×13-inch baking dish. Season with salt, pepper, and tarragon and top with cheese slices.
2. Mix soup and wine, pour over chicken.
3. Mix stuffing and melted butter, crumble on top.
4. Bake uncovered at 300 for 90 minutes.

Be generous with the cheese and soup and wine and stuffing. They’re the best parts. The chicken is almost superfluous. (Though maybe I say that only because I’m not much of a carnivore.)

The only bad thing about this recipe is that it takes 90 minutes to cook… sometimes more like two hours. Conveniently, you probably have extra swiss cheese and white wine sitting around, so you can serve yourself some while you’re waiting.

Also while we’re waiting for my dinner to cook, I’ll introduce you to my grocery bag.

I made my grocery bag using the How to sew a curved bag gusset tutorial over at the U-handblog. It’s one of the most useful things I’ve ever made. In the picture above, it’s holding all the ingredients necessary for the cheese & wine chicken (sans wine — I forgot my ID and had to go back out for that later, le sigh — and also sans chicken, which was leaking, so I put it in a separate plastic bag) plus ingredients for the next two dinners I’ll make, which, since I’m cooking for one, is almost a week and a half’s worth of food.

I don’t have a car, so my grocery bag makes shopping much easier. I hardly ever buy more food than can fit in the bag (thanks to not having a car, of course), and it slings comfortably over my shoulder with a padded strap. Plus, it’s all in cheerful colors, so it makes me feel a bit more cheerful when I pull it out.

And now my food is done, after taunting me with its smell for an hour and a half:

rosemary bread yet again

First I baked rosemary bread yet again, for a dinner party, following this recipe for an unkneaded peasant bread. This time it came out much much lighter, fluffier, and more delicious. Basically I followed the directions more carefully and this worked (who knew!) although I also stuck my roommate’s pizza stone in the oven while it was preheating, then stuck the bread pan right on top of it to while baking, which may have helped.

I infused some olive oil with garlic and left-over fresh rosemary while it was baking, too, for dipping purposes. This was a good idea.

mm breakfast!

Hungry grad students ate all my bread at once, so the next day I made scones, using my current favorite recipe (via Smitten Kitchen, with modifications here), only lemon-zest-and-cranberry this time (I had no oranges). A nice thing I’d forgotten about this recipe is it involves no eggs, except for the glaze, so licking the spoon is completely acceptable.

Finally, I made tomatoes filled with rice again (for the third time!) and yet again, they were devoured before photographic evidence could be acquired. You’ll just have to trust me on them.

Here's the bread rising, looking bizarre

cooling after the second bake

I’ve been craving cookies, but I don’t actually like them so much (too sweet); I just want something to go with coffee, and biscotti are generally not super rich, due to having no shortening usually. Melody recommended this recipe from joy of baking. I like my biscotti as plain as possible, so almond it was, but the link will also tell you how to make a chocolate glaze/frosting, and almond biscotti often have some anise in, too. For the nut-intolerant, cranberries or chocolate chips would probably substitute pretty well for the almonds (and though the original calls for almond extract, I didn’t have any so I just used extra vanilla and it worked fine. I thought about adding some Scotch because I was worried about blandness ["Vanilla extract is alcohol! Bailey's Irish Cream is made of whiskey and sweet and comes in an almond version!"] Then I didn’t. This was probably for the best.)

You need:

• 1 cup blanched, toasted, and coarsely chopped whole almonds
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/8-1/4 tsp salt (the original called for 1/8 and I don’t think it was quite enough.)
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 3 large eggs
• 1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• zest of most of a lemon, I guess, but not really grating the pith, just the pretty yellow bit, also a lot of it sticks to the grater anyway so it’s not as much as it sounds

Blanching the almonds: I guess you could buy pre-toasted, pre-chopped almonds, if you’re lame. So preheat the oven to 350F. Take your whole raw almonds and blanch them by boiling some water, adding the almonds and taking it off the heat, letting sit for 1 min (not more! gets mushy and bad!), then straining them out and running under cold water. Now the skins will come off really easily so do that and put your blanched, skinless almonds on a baking sheet. Toast them for ~10min (took me 12 min) till they’re turning a little bit golden and start to smell good. Maybe shake them around a little partway through. Now, have at them with knife. They don’t need to be evenly chopped at all – in fact a mixture of little nearly-powdered bits and halves or quarters makes for a nice texture.

You can turn the oven down to 300F now.

In a smallish bowl, beat the eggs with the vanilla extract – or 1 tsp vanilla and 1/2 tsp almond extract, if you have it, or whatever other fanciness you feel like. In another and larger bowl, mix your dry ingredients: flour, sugar, baking powder, salt. Pour the egg mixture in a bit at a time and mix it into a dough slowly. The original tells you to use an electric mixer; this was the opposite of helpful. I used spoon and hands after electric mixer disaster. When the wet ingredients are about half in, add the almonds.

You should have a thick, sugary dough. Divide into two equal lumps. Flour some countertop; roll each lump into a log about 10 in. long and 2 in. wide. Put them on a lightly greased baking sheet (flouring it might also have helped, in retrospect) with a bit of space between them. Depending on how flat you want your biscotti, you could squish them down a little. Bake for ~40 min or till no longer squishy to the touch.

Biscotti get their name because they’re baked twice (oh, Italy, you are so clever) so now you have to slice them and bake them again. But first, let them cool for at least 10 min! Then use a large serrated knife and caution. Mine crumbled a lot. Cut at an angle to make the right shape. I couldn’t get 1/2 inch slices to not break, but remember they will be hard and you will have to bite them so perhaps don’t go much thicker. Arrange them lying down on your baking sheet and stick them back in the oven, flipping halfway through, for about 15 min per side, or (again) until not squishy.

Let them cool and make coffee! I will be having mine with moka coffee for breakfast tomorrow.

However, Cait was pondering cupcakes, and showed me a recipe for Thai Ice Tea Cupcakes, and hey, I HAD ALL THOSE INGREDIENTS IN MY HOUSE minus the cream cheese for the frosting, but I was at the point where I’d be willing to go out and get that later. 

Yesterday consisted of lessons about chard. Today I learned about cooking with egg whites! I r total baking/cooking noob, so I’d never separated eggs before. Beating egg whites to “soft peaks” also presented itself as a new experience. Basically, beat them eggs until they’re all delightfully foamy!

Then … I had to fold them into the batter. What even??

Luckily, I had Sophie on the intarwebs to hold my hand through all this. She also sent me this video, which features a delightfully congenial and not-cheesy guide to all of the above. Folding the eggs properly is especially key for leavening (or “sproinging” as Sophie said) the cupcakes. Like bread!

I don’t think I folded the egg whites totally evenly, but it was still so satisfying to see some of them just poppin’ up! Like daisies! And look how adorably round some of them are!

In the end, they taste very quirkily delicious. I mean, they didn’t taste like thai ice tea, and it’s hard to describe beyond “nom-worthy”. The frostings were pretty badass, though. WARNING: I’d say you only need a fourth of what the frosting recipe calls for, as I now have a huge bag of thai ice tea cream cheese frosting leftover. It’s definitely more than enough for 24 cupcakes. Then again, my cupcakes don’t look nearly as voluminous and pretty as the original post’s pictures. HMM.

And yeah, I made some thai ice tea to eat with my cupcake. It’s made with a mix my parents get from GrandMart. My mom throws little jasmine tea leaves in, and they add a lovely twist to the drink!

The caponata from here (a friend recently got Giada de Laurentiis’s cookbook and it was a worthwhile investment in terms of deliciousness) – ingredients I didn’t have on hand (capers, celery) + a bed of arugula with a little olive oil and some crumbled feta = lunch.

The next day I made the leftover caponata into toasted sandwiches with cheese and it was even better. So it’s a pretty good investment of the time it takes to saute all that stuff, especially if you are like me and derive a somewhat unhealthy pleasure from reducing an entire eggplant into little squishy cubes.

For bonus points, feed this bread to starving graduate students and feel particularly good about yourself!

Only things I changed: clearly I don’t have a fancy mixer so I hand-mixed (had to actually use hands, not a spoon, for a minute to get the dough all together); dried rosemary because I had no fresh on hand, and so I tossed in a bit more; olive oil for melted butter brushed on the top; and because I was still using up the instant yeast, I just let it rise 1 hour in the bowl + 30min after shaping while the oven heated.

And here are some unrelated cupcakes that are just really darn pretty.